“What power has love but forgiveness?In other wordsby its interventionwhat has been donecan be undone.What good is it otherwise?”

“So most of my life has been lived in hell.”

“I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.”

“We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.”

“We sit and talk,quietly, with long lapses of silenceand I am aware of the streamthat has no language, coursingbeneath the quiet heaven ofyour eyeswhich has no speech”

“My surface is myself.Under whichto witness, youth isburied. Roots?Everybody has roots.”

“I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.”William Carlos Williams, c. 1931”